From the air, Afghanistan is a land of striking physical contrasts-a muddy patchwork quilt surrounded by craggy snow-topped peaks. The scars of two decades of war, which become evident as you get closer, are entirely man-made.

NEW HOPE: Hazara children line up to welcome an Interim Government member

Bagram airbase, 40 km north of Kabul, is littered with the detritus of war-bombed-out shells of aircraft, a row of MiG-21s strafed by American fighters, still standing in their mud-walled pens. It also hosts delicious post-Cold War ironies. The infrastructure built by a dead superpower-the Soviets built Bagram to battle US-backed mujahideen-has now been taken up by its erstwhile rival to fight a menace that it once nurtured. Sinister, black twin-rotored US Chinook helicopters land and take off, troops rush about in dune-buggies, others march about weighed down by 40 pounds of equipment. "Don't step off the concrete if you don't want your foot blown off,'' a marine grins a warning about the airstrip's heavily mined perimeter.

Ensconced in a government helicopter, Mehrabodin Mastan, charge de affaires of the Afghan Embassy in Paris, peers out over the arid Shomali Plains north of Kabul, where Northern Alliance fighters faced off with the Taliban. Besides the ruins of an Al Qaida training camp, the only objects breaking the monotony of the dusty plains are a few tanks bombed by US aircraft.

"Some day,'' says Mastan wistfully, "Kabul will extend till here.'' Expansion may take time yet, but with the last Daisy Cutters falling over Tora Bora, Afghanistan's immediate priorities are rebuilding its shattered country, a task that United Nations officials say will cost at least $10 billion (Rs 48,000 crore). What are the priorities for the newly liberated nation? "Infrastructure, agriculture, schools and hospitals-there really is no sphere in which Afghanistan will not need assistance,'' says Hamid Karzai, chairman of the six-month interim government and his country's hope for the future.

LETTING THE WORLD IN: Postcards of Bollywood filmstars are hot currency, and satellite dishes are selling well;(Below) vendors wheel a Christmas tree through the streets of Kabul

The task is a formidable one for a country seemingly stranded in perennial war, one with the highest per capita Kalashnikov count, rock-bottom social indicators, a three-year drought and 10 million landmines still scattered through the countryside. The Taliban's maniacal quest for pure Islamhood turned it into the world's most isolated and repressed state. The once cosmopolitan capital Kabul still bears the regime's scars. Electricity supply is erratic. Connectivity with the outside world is mainly through satellite phone or one of the Telecom Department's 97 phone lines. Public health and sanitation are poor and unemployment rampant. Government employees haven't been paid salaries for six months. Nearly a third of Kabul's estimated 1 million population are fed by international aid agencies.

Decades of conflict have taken a severe mental and physical toll on Afghans. Dr Marina Nawabi, a gynaecologist at the Rabia Balkhi hospital, pushes forward her list of patients for the day-24 fresh cases of primary and secondary infertility. "Half my female patients have infertility problems. It's all because of the war,'' she sighs, saying stress is the basic cause.

War without respite has also had other subtler side-effects. The walls of a half-complete building in the city are adorned with crude charcoal sketches of fighter planes, tanks and helicopter gunships-juvenile impressions of an entire generation of Afghans which has grown up in the din of battle. Streets are full of beggars, most of them snot-nosed children and war widows.

For all its misery, the emotion now pulsating through the country of roughly 20 million people is that of hope. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kabul, which has slowly begun to reclaim its cosmopolitan symbols. Restaurants blare out Hindi film music, dish antennae have appeared on rooftops, garish postcards of Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai are outsold only by Guevaraesque posters of Afghanistan's national hero, the late Ahmad Shah Masood. Ruby-cheeked children are playing in the Shahr-i-Nau park where two Arab Al Qaida men were lynched by citizens not so long ago.

Four of Kabul's 14 cinemas have creaked back to life, screening Bollywood films that were buried under floorboards to save them from the Taliban's arsonists. The newest release packing the crowds into Kabul's 540-seat Park Cinema is the 10-year-old Sanjay Dutt-Feroze Khan starrer Yalgaar. At the reception area of the Kabul Hotel a roomful of strapping Pashtoons-a bystander whispers that they are former Talibs-with long beards, and huge turbans grin at each other as they watch the saucy remix video Yeh Vaada Raha on TV.

In another area of the city, Abdul Wahab, 22, proprietor of the grandly titled Abdul Wahab Metal Processing Corporation, leads the way into a dingy mud-walled room where he made satellite dishes for five years during the Taliban rule. Wahab's six-man workforce now spills out on the pavement to cut and hammer blue metal containers and stretch them over 4 ft wide parabola skeletons. A task that takes them a little over an hour for a dish that fetches about Rs 1,400 per piece. His twin workshops churn out 15 dishes a day to meet the demands of Kabul's entertainment-starved denizens.

RESTING THEIR GUNS: Government troops watch Kabul TV in a restaurant in the city

There are also pleas for world attention. "We've just emerged from prison,'' says Khwaja Masoom, president of Kabul's grain market who carefully peels an apple with an AK-47 bayonet. "I just hope the world doesn't ignore us like they did the last time.''

Post September 11, that's unlikely. If global interest in Afghanistan until recently stemmed from the perception that it was the only hurdle to the huge central Asian natural gas reserves, rebuilding it will now ensure it doesn't become a terrorist paradise again. The Tokyo conference in late January will draw up the blueprint for reconstructing the shattered country from the bottom up. Meanwhile, aid is pouring in from all over the world. India is putting together a Rs 1,000-crore aid package and its doctors attend to nearly 400 children at the Indira Gandhi Polyclinic each day; British engineers are installing a 500-line phone exchange; Russian engineers are helping reopen the 2.7-km-long Salang Tunnel north of Kabul; Italy has given them a brand new TV station and has even promised to train the Afghan Olympic team.

Nearly five million Afghan refugees who fled into Iran and Pakistan over the last two decades are beginning to trickle in, picking up life where they left off. "We don't need soldiers any more, we'd prefer doctors and engineers,'' says Haji Mukarram, a benign looking commander from Tora Bora. Fifteen years ago, Akbar Sherzai, 42, a machine-gun wielding mujahid, migrated to the US. Now this stocky, well-dressed rug dealer from Washington D.C. plans to settle down in Kabul. He's just one of an estimated 8,000 Afghans planning to return from the US.

Reminders of the Taliban regime which persecuted women-who make up over 60 per cent of the population-still persist. Burqa sellers report brisk business as almost without exception, women still don the Taliban-designed frilly light blue veil that makes them look like inverted shuttlecocks. They cringe at requests for photographs. "The veil will go only when women return to the universities and offices they left a decade ago,'' reasons Fahima Razki, 30, a former clerk at the Finance Ministry. Hopefully, that day is not too far away.